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I was just processing pics from my trip in New York and I saw this series of pics. I wanted to get them up here in the blog before I forget about them.
For the flight from Minneapolis, St.Paul to New York, Harz and I were on the same plane, in the back two seats on the left hand side. He had the window. I sat next to him. And some random guy sat to my right.
Taking off from Minneapolis was no problem. Smooth sailing.
Harz and I both plugged in our ipods and wasted the time away.
When we got over New York, we got our one and only view of The Statue of Liberty. I had Harz snap up this shot of it.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was my one and only view of it. We spent three days on the island, site-seeing like loons and never ONCE got another glimpse of it. What can I say? New York's a big fuckin' place.
Our view of Manhattan, itself, was pretty daunting.
Christ. That thing is HUGE. And there are so many buildings. I felt a little bit intimidated, when I saw this.
It was shortly after I took this picture that we hit a bad patch of turbulence that lasted until we landed at LaGuardia.
You should know that the next sequence of pictures are presented, without censorship and in the order that they were taken.
Harz had forewarned me that he "didn't fly very well". I didn't really know what that meant. I thought, he might've meant that it made him a little nervous. It does. Well, that and a whole lot more.
First, he start burping. And groaning to himself. And burping. As his nervous insides churned themselves into a whirling dervish of pastry and orange juice and whatever else you find inside a Harz.
"I don't feel so good," he said. "Feel my arm." I did and he was saturated with sweat. It occurred to me that this might not end well, at all.
The plane bounced up and down like a healthy pair of breasts on a roller coaster. We would leap up suddenly and then swing down and sway a bit. People on the rest of the airplane nervously laughed. The pilot assured us that this was pretty typical and that we needed to fasten our seatbelt. Beside me, Harz got paler and paler and continued to occasionally burp and mutter to himself.
With great import, he reached up and slid the barf-bag out of the seat in front of him and gently laid it in his lap.
I talked him through the experience like a calm, cool, licensed lamas teacher.
"Breathe, Harz. Control the breathes to get control over your body. Breathing aerates the body and relaxes the muscles. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth." As if this was the most normal thing in the world. Happens all the time.
Harz gamely tried everything I suggested. Both of us spoke in quiet, subdued voices. We didn't want to alarm the other travelers that we might be about to have a Harz blowout. He coughed for a bit and that turned into a gag and we were off to the races...
I want to state, here and now, that none of these were staged photographs. What you're seeing here is EXACTLY what it looks like. It's Harz, tossing his cookies. I figured that I was pretty useless to him, at this point. Harz was doing battle with his spasming stomach. Which freed me up to document the whole thing. I even thought, "this is going to make an outstanding blog entry, someday." Beside me, Harz loudly vomitted into the bag, within easy hearing range of everyone around us.
I began to notice the people around us, reacting to Harz's loud, pitiful barfing sound. All of us were belted in, so there wasn't a whole of "Looking around for who is barfing" to be done. People craned their necks and looked around at us. And I would look apologetically at them, what else could I do? I also rubbed Harz's back and talked calmly and quietly to him. The two teenage girls in front of us were getting sick from the sound of it and the pulled up the hoods of their hoodies and pulled a Kenny" on themselves, hoping to drown out the sound.
Harz barfed for the entirety of the landing. Each jostle or bank of the plane just shook him up that much more and there would be fresh waves of coughing, hacking and barfing all over again. Ironically enough, as soon as we touched down, Harz straightened up, sealed his barf-bag up and announced, "I gotta go piss. Bad!"
He'd weathered the worst part of the whole flight and came up a champ!
"Feel my arm now," he said and when I did, it was 100% different. No longer clammy and sweaty. He was cool as a cucumber. "I can't handle that turbulence, but I feel totally fine now." The plane taxi'd to our gate and Harz plotted his quickest route to the bathroom, immediately behind us.
I thought to myself that if THAT was how we landed in New York, things could only improve, right? Of course, they did. We just had one of those very memorable arrivals into town. To my knowledge that was the one and only time that one of us ralphed on that trip. So, that's something, right?
Cheers,
Mr.B
